The cloud workload security (CWS) market has been rapidly consolidating capabilities like cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM), cloud security posture management (CSPM), etc., into their offering. But despite a more robust product, it oftentimes still stands alone in an organization’s security infrastructure. Considering that attacks don’t always originate and stay in just the cloud, it’s clear that a siloed approach to security is not the safest option.
Organizations should prioritize shifting from individual security tools to interconnected cybersecurity platforms for more effective threat response. When evaluating a vendor, consider their long-term strategy and overall vision. Does the vendor have a solid roadmap and execution plan for improved outcomes in 2024 and beyond? Are they making investments in consolidating point products into a platform for a more holistic approach to cybersecurity?
Trend Micro’s forward-looking security strategy consolidates its CWS offering into its modern, AI-powered cybersecurity platform to provide central visibility, proactive risk management, and faster detection and response. Let’s dive a bit deeper into the platform advantage.
The platform advantage
Trend Vision One™ – Cloud Security is an advanced offering with CSPM, agentless vulnerability/malware scanning, API visibility, compliance checks, and more. Furthermore, it protects your workloads whether are running within AWS, Microsoft Azure, GCP services, multi-cloud, or on-premises. But beyond the breadth and depth of its cloud capabilities, it’s also part of the Trend Vision One™ platform.
CWS telemetry from data centers to cloud workloads, applications, and cloud-native architectures feeds into the Trend Vision One platform and is correlated with data from networks, workloads, endpoints, email, and identities. This integration is the key to enhanced visibility across an organization’s complex multi- and hybrid-cloud environments and shores up several other benefits:
- Faster correlation = faster threat detection. Instead of wasting valuable time manually piecemealing data across several point products, Trend Vision One leverages industry-leading XDR to automate this process across the attack surface so you can identify threats faster.
- Faster risk assessments and prioritization. Identifying threats is the first step, but it shouldn’t stop there. Risk assessments should be continual and contextualized to prioritize risk against several factors, such as the likelihood of an attack, the possible impact of an outage, and asset criticality. This will reduce the volume of alerts and eliminate blind investigations. Prioritized risk enables security teams to drill down into immediate concerns and proactively quell threats.
- Enables enforcement of consistent policy, risk assessment, and security controls regardless of where workloads are running all from one place.
- Empowers collaboration between various security stakeholders on cloud teams, ITOps, SOC, etc,. by bringing together individual tools in one platform. Trend Vision One boasts an intuitive, user-friendly interface with customizable dashboards so every user can see the information most pertinent to their role at-a-glance.
Not all platforms are equal
Features and functionality are key, but security buyers must factor in more than just capabilities. Here are three questions to consider when evaluating a CWS vendor and their platform:
1. Is the platform built from the ground up or does it rely on third party integrations to deliver its capabilities? A native, purpose-built platform is highly customizable to fit your security needs and unique infrastructure, whereas a platform that heavily depends on third-party integrations and acquisitions tends to be a one-size (doesn’t) fit all product.
2. Is it ready to go “out of the box”? Recall the era when a plane ticket covered checked bags and seat selection? Discount airlines may offer shockingly low fares, but unless you plan on traveling light or sitting next to restrooms, anticipate and factor in additional costs. Similarly, some vendors require you to purchase expensive and complex add-on modules for EPP/EDR, automation, and threat intelligence capabilities.
3. What is the vendor’s potential for innovation? We mentioned this at the start, but it’s so important it needs to be said twice. Digital transformation has never been so fast—or relentless—meaning that what works today will most likely need a few tweaks and upgrades to work in the future. Make sure the vendor has invested in research and development with a strong presence in the global threat intelligence community. They should also have a roadmap and action plan to continuously evolve and improve their platform in line with security needs.
Conclusion
Remember: attacks don’t always originate and stay exclusively in the cloud. A CWS offering needs to consolidate into a holistic platform so security teams can see the entire chain of attack and remediate risk sooner.
Beyond choosing the best platform option, choose the best long-term partner. If you’ve been sold a great product but you’re unsure if it’s configured properly for optimal use because the customer service is non-existent, that fancy contraption is useless. And since cyber threats and crime aren’t going away anytime soon (or ever), you need a partner who is in it for the long haul—growing and adapting to the ever-evolving digital and threat landscape with you.
For more information on platform-based cloud security, click here.